In German Hearts, a Pirate Spreads the Plunder Again

STRALSUND, Germany — Filthy, bearded actors with broadswords and cellphones milled outside the 14th-century brick Gothic gabled house at dusk here last week, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee from plastic cups to stay warm as the sun set. Inside the house, a landmark, a film crew was preparing to start rolling again on “13 Paces Without a Head,” the story of a peculiarly German hero, the egalitarian pirate Klaus Störtebeker.

The feature-film production is just the latest sign of a Störtebeker renaissance. A documentary about the pirate was shown on German television last Christmas, and a two-part television miniseries the year before.

At the national celebration of the German reunification holiday, which rotates among cities and took place in Hamburg on Oct. 3, representatives from Wismar, Schwerin, Hamburg and elsewhere staged a theatrical production called “Störtebeker, a North German Pirate.”

Pirates of the Baltic may sound like a frigid satire of their warmer Caribbean cousins (and to which some of the recent success can no doubt be attributed), but the legend has been rejuvenated in part as a response to the growing sense of economic injustice.

“I think that he has become so popular again today because of the Robin Hood urge in all of us,” said Geerd Dahms, a historian and publisher of Dahms Audio Books, an organizer of the holiday event. “With the current economic crisis, with the widening gap between rich and poor, many find themselves wishing they had a Störtebeker on their side.”

Störtebeker was legendary for prodigious drinking — the name means roughly “downing the mug” — and high crimes on the high seas, but is perhaps best known for miraculously walking past his condemned shipmates after Hamburg authorities beheaded him in 1401. The executioners were supposed to free his men if he could accomplish this impossible feat, but they reneged.

His revival marks an unusual honor for a figure who would be considered a criminal if plying his trade off the coast of Somalia today. But Störtebeker was also famous for dividing the plunder equally among his mates and, in some versions of the myth, even sharing it with the poor.

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Ronald Zehrfeld, left, a film actor, as the pirate Klaus Störtebeker, and Matthias Schweighöfer, a co-star, in Stralsund, Germany.Credit
Thomas Häntzschel/Associated Press

It is in large part thanks to these fair-deal impulses that Klaus Störtebeker is enjoying a revival in Germany’s socially conscious culture, especially here in northern coastal towns where he is believed to have dropped anchor.

Ronald Zehrfeld, the actor playing Störtebeker in the film, called the role “a childhood dream.” Asked to describe his character, he said, “He butchers people, but also has a very, very big heart.”

The pirate’s status has waxed and waned since the Romantic period, enjoying particularly good runs during the Nazi era and in socialist East Germany. He has been the subject of rock songs, adventure novels and even a baroque opera. The slogan of Störtebeker beer, brewed in Stralsund, is “the beer of the righteous.”

“This strikes a nerve of social justice at the moment,” said Philip Kalisch, one of the movie pirates outside the Gothic house here, who had been made picture-perfect medieval grimy — right down to the black cuticles — by the makeup team.

Mr. Kalisch, 29, responded to an open call for actors and received time off from his job in Hamburg working for a Social Democratic member of Parliament to appear in the production. “People really want to see the fat pepper sacks relieved of a bit of their riches,” he said, using a seasoned German term for the wealthy.

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Much has been made of the fact that the capitalists responsible for the current global financial crisis are, in many cases, being propped up with multibillion-dollar state bailouts. In the name of stability, no one is in a hurry to see the bankers, or more to the point their banks, fail.

It may be completely appropriate to applaud today as the early capitalists of the Hanseatic League, the organization of German merchant towns whose ships Mr. Störtebeker reputedly preyed upon, are run through, keelhauled and made to walk the plank. In these difficult times, it may even be a little therapeutic.

“He’s like Che Guevara, a freedom fighter, but also like Robin Hood, because he fights the rich in the name of the poor,” said Philipp Benz, 18, from Stralsund, after asking an actor in the old town square for an autograph. “We need someone like him these days, with all the terrible things happening to workers.”

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The Störtebeker revival is strong in northern Germany.Credit
The New York Times

A report last month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, showing rising income inequality in Germany, provoked a significant outcry here. Even greater outrage greeted a study in September in which Germany was the only European country surveyed where real wages fell from 2000 to 2008.

“The worse it goes for the Germans economically, the more they seek refuge in myths,” said Arne Lorenz, producer of the Störtebeker documentary. The renewed popularity of Störtebeker “is definitely due to the economic situation.”

In Communist East Germany, outdoor theater productions about the pirate were intermittently staged on the island of Rügen, a short drive north of Stralsund, starting in 1959. East Germany, “as a newborn country, had to search for heroes who could, if you will, act as forerunners in the development of the country,” said Peter Hick, who was raised in East Germany and who revived and expanded the theatrics after reunification.

His productions, known as the Störtebeker Festspiele, drew 378,000 people last year to watch an extravaganza that included the staging of maritime ship battles, swordfights on horseback and fireworks. As of mid-October, Mr. Hick said 50,000 tickets had been presold for the 2009 season, compared with 40,000 at the same point the year before.

Klaus Störtebeker is intriguing as a German hero in part because the country has so few heroes. Since World War II, Germans “quite correctly approach everything heroic with a significant degree of mistrust,” said Stefan Schubert, one of the film’s producers. A big-budget film about the World War I flying ace the Red Baron, starring the heartthrob Matthias Schweighöfer — who plays a friend and fellow privateer, Gödeke Michels, in the Störtebeker film — was a flop this year.

The producers said “13 Paces” would be a buddy film, about Michels and Störtebeker in crisis, trying to decide if they should continue to be pirates. “Most of what is known is pure legend, which gave us the chance to work quite freely with the material,” Mr. Schubert said.

Gregor Rohmann, a historian at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt, said the story of Störtebeker’s execution in Hamburg was mostly likely a myth. He cited archival evidence that Störtebeker was still alive and paying customs duties in 1413, though his first name was Johannes instead of Klaus.

More damaging to the myth might be the fact that, according to Mr. Rohmann’s research, he was a businessman as well as a pirate, and given his cutthroat style of competition, probably not a very nice one.

Correction: November 13, 2008

The Stralsund Journal article on Thursday, about German admiration for Klaus Störtebeker, a 14th century pirate, egalitarian and legendary drinker whose last name is the beer brand brewed in Stralsund, Germany, misstated the month of the national reunification holiday, when, during this year’s festivities, representatives from several cities staged a theatrical production based on Störtebeker’s life. The holiday is Oct. 3, not in September.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: In German Hearts, a Pirate Spreads the Plunder Again. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe